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🧬 What is a Protein Microarray?
Imagine a tiny glass slide, no bigger than a stamp, that acts like a miniature testing lab. A Protein Microarray is essentially a chip where thousands of different, purified proteins are spotted in highly organized, microscopic dots.
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Their Core Function: This platform allows researchers to simultaneously test how a single sample (like blood serum or a cell extract) interacts with all those different proteins. It's a high-throughput way to get a lot of data from a very small sample.
How it works (Simply): You apply your sample to the slide. If a molecule in your sample (say, an antibody) finds a protein it likes, it sticks to it. A special fluorescent tag then highlights these sticking points, and a scanner reads the whole slide, telling you exactly which interactions happened.